Wednesday, 20 June 2007

We know that the Microsoft Silverlight is now the hottest technology in the current market. It is getting more popular nowadays. Currently, Silverlight supports only Microsoft Vista and Windows XP SP2. In order to cater the silverlight features to the common open source user, the open source crowd has plans to come up with what is called "Moonlight". Mono has started building up the Silverlight's version for Linux and open source systems, i.e., Moonlight.

What is Mono?

Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows and Unix. The Mono Open source project is sponsored by Novell. Mono is currently being used by a number of commercial software vendors and corporate enterprises to provide a rich environment for developing cross-platform applications. OTEE Implements Award-Winning 3D Game Development System Using Mono.

Microsoft Silverlight

Microsoft describes Silverlight as “a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications.”

Moonlight

It's simply a Mono based implementation of Silverlight, project temporarily named as Monolight. Moonlight is written with a combination of C++ and C# code. Moonlight uses version 1.1 of Silverlight, a browser plug-in for displaying interactive Web applications, which is due in the fall. Once completed, Moonlight will allow Linux users to see Silverlight content on the Web, such as videos, and run rich Internet applications.

Moonlight Screenshots

Some of the examples of Moonlight can be seen on this site. Some progress has been done on Moonlight and here are some of the screenshots of some of the examples made using Moonlight. Currently, Moonlight is in alpha. To get Moonlight for Linux, access Mono Moonlight site and it has a step by step process to get Moonlight.